upon DECEMBER 22.

upon DECEMBER 22, 1999, ROBERT BRESSON THE DIRECTOR OF THIRTEEN LAPIDARY FEATURE FILMS, DIED AT THE AGE OF NINETY-EIGHT. above THE COURSE OF A CAREER THAT SPANNED HALF A hundred years BRESSON HONED A LACONIC, INTENSELY PERSONAL title THAT HAS INFLUENCED FILMMAKERS FROM JEAN-LUC GODARD TO JIM JARMUSCH. HERE, NOVELISTS GARY INDIANA AND DENNIS COOPER AND ARTIST STEPHEN PRINA ASSESS THE SIGNIFICANCE OF BRESSON'S ART IN THEIR confess LIVES AND WORK, WHILE FILM HISTORIAN DAVID BORDWELL DISCUSSES THE FRENCH MASTER'S PLACE IN THE HISTORY OF CINEMATIC STYLE

FIRST COMMUNION

DENNIS COOPER

IN THE EARLY '80 A FRIEND INVITED ME TO a screening of Robert Bresson's The Devil, Probably, forward the condition that, no matter what, I not say a word about it afterward. He claimed that Bresson's films had of that kind a profound, consuming effect onward him that he couldn't bear equable the slightest outside interference until their immediate incantation wore off, which he warned me might take hours. He was not normally a melodramatic, overly sensitive, or pretentious living body so I just thought he was being weird--until the house lights went down. All around us, moviegoers yawned or laughed derisively; about even fled the theater. moreover watching the film, I experienced an emotion more intense than any I'd evermore have guessed art could exhibit The critic Andrew Sarris, writing forward Bresson's work, once famously characterized this reaction as a convulsion of one's entire being, which rings genuine to me. Ever since, I've imposed basically the same condition in succession those rare friends whom I trust enough to sit beside during the screening of a Bresson film, and I'm not otherwise a particularly melodramatic, sensitive, or pretentious person

Bresson isn't just my favorite artist. There's a whole doom more to it than that, yet the effect he has had forward me is too enormous and personal to distill. forward a practical level, his work put togethered my sensibility as a writer by the agency of offering up the idea that it was possible for an artwork's phraseology to embody a kind of pragmatism that, if sufficiently rigorous and devot to a sufficiently powerful expose would eliminate the need within the work for an open philosophical or moral standpoint. each artist tries in some way to find that least compromised intersection of planes where his or her ideas come up to face to face and slightly exceed the world's expectations, however I don't think anyone has plant a more perfectly balanced diction than Bresson. His work communicates an unyielding, peculiarly personal vision of the world in a voice in the way that sterilized as to achieve an almost inhuman efficiency and logic. The be derived is a kind of cinematic machine whose appoints locations, narrative, and models (Bresson's preferr mete for actors) function together as an unhierarchical unit in this way perfectly self-sufficient that all that is revealed within each film is the disconcerting failure of the patterns to fulfill Bresson's requirements. Their emotions resonate, despite a conscientious effort in succession Bresson's part to make them rouse about and speak as admitting they have none. The fact that the actors, unlike any other aspect of Bresson's films, are driven on individual feeling draws attention almost by means of default, and creates a relationship with the audience in the same manner intimate that it's almost unbearable in its aesthetic restrictions.

A sated appreciation of Bresson's work requires moviegoers to approach his films as admitting starting from scratch. This is a vast thing to ask of an audience, which is to what end Bresson's films will always pick their admirers with care and infrequency. on the contrary the films earn that quality of commitment because, despite their intensive demands, they ask almost nothing for themselves. They're too plain to be considered experimental or avant-garde, and require no suspension of disbelief. if it were not that they're antitraditional as well, although their relate to for the tradition of storytelling borders in succession the fanatical. They're neither difficult nor easy to watch, at least not in the usual faculty of perceptions of those words. Instead of flaunting their difference, or feigning decency by deferring to the conventions of Hollywood film, they show up an art so unimpeachably fair, in this way lacking in ulterior motivation that the drift is a kind of mimicry of what perception might be like were single in kind capable of simultaneously perceiving clearly and appreciating th e proces by means of which perception occurs. The and nothing else thing these films ask is that single in kind share a fraction of Bresson's single-minded make uneasy for the souls of young family whose innocence causes them to fail at the relentless irrevocable task of adulthood.

Apart from his first feature, the comedy Le Anges du peche, and perhaps the curiously brief if fascinating Une Femme douce, Bresson not at any time made a film that's les than sublime. For whatever reason, his early, black-and-white films like Pickpocket, Diary of a rural parts Priest, and Mouchette are the greatest in quantity celebrated. But, if anything, his later, les widely circulated color films--Four Nights of a Dreamer, Lancelot du Lac, The Devil, Probably, and L'Argent--are the masterpieces among his masterpieces, to my mind. Many of the aforementioned stylistic figure of speechs for which Bresson is alternately reviled and admired reached their sated significance in this latter part of his oeuvre as the lapsed Catholicism that gave his early, doomed characters the unallied possibility of redemption and allowed viewers to interpret his work's introversion as a metaphor for religious self-erasure throw aways ground to an even more thoroughly hopeles notion of fate as the random and godles chain of marked occurrences that structures a life. In Bresson's ea rlier films, the protagonist's almost inevitable suicide is a tragic segue into the comforting delusion of heaven; in the later films, suicide is the inexorable result given the bleak circumstances; and the staggering numbnes induced by the agency of Bresson's cold, mechanical witness to these deaths forms the least opinionated, and therefore barely accurate depiction of suicide's results that I've ever come across.